Hacker News Reader

That's an awfully long way to reach for an explanation of why teachers don't make money, when "supply and demand" was sitting right in front of you. There are lots of teachers. It's not very hard, not particularly more so than many other careers. There aren't a lot of top celebrities, since that works on the competition model (like sports).

If it makes you "feel" any better, there are lots of computer programmers, too. Saying there is a lot of something doesn't have to mean it's "easy", just... that there's a lot of it.

I'm not seeing where some sort of complicated explanation is necessary.

If it's merely a matter of cardinality, how do you explain Mozart? There was only one of him.

Again, why do I have to reach farther than "the nature of the Gaussian distribution says there will be outliers"?

(Also... "there was only one Mozart" is rather more hero worship than truth. There are many factors that coincided to make Mozart, and I fully expect there have been multiple people since then that have been every bit as talented, but didn't have the same factors coming together. Going into that would be a long, long post about music theory and music history, though.)

> An elementary school teacher is only paid a small amount relative to most celebrities because their impact is small. They cannot reach more 10-30 students at a time. A baseball player is paid millions because he (through cable TV) can impact/entertain many more anonymous people indirectly. Is it fair?

I would say it is fair, if you define fair to mean that what someone gets paid should roughly reflect the utility they create for others. Rockstars and baseball players can reach a large audience and give pleasure to them.

If a teacher is only helping c. 30 students, then even if each one of them gains far more utility from him than from a rockstar, the total amount of utility the teacher is creating isn't going to be as much, because of the smaller audience.

To put it another way: some jobs aren't scalable, some jobs are (e.g. musicians, sports stars), and the top people in the jobs that're scalable are going to create a lot more utility, and in a market economy earn a lot more money, than the top people in the unscalable jobs.

What about columnists? Shouldn't they be affecting a lot of people, but get a disproportionate income.

The ones who can successfully argue that they're unique do make a lot of money. The ones whose fame rests completely on the soapbox provided by others don't.

Teachers have a huge impact becasue they deeply effect the few students they have, who in turn shape the world.

Maybe. I've gone to school (not college) on two continents and 3 countries and I've had great and bad teachers and everything in between.

But none of them was unique or had an irreplaceable life changing impact on me.

Obviously that can happen for some children, but then again it could happen with your neighbor or any good figure of wisdom.

Teachers can have a huge impact with online education.

Not really, to have an impact a teacher needs 1-on-1 time with a student, otherwise the kid might as well use electronic material without any teacher at all.

What about online university lectures? Isn't there potential for some of those professors to have a huge impact?

Sure, but the bigger differences are usually made while people are younger. It gives them more time to take advantage of them and grow with them.

*addendum: In short, if they can appreciate the university lecture, odds are they've already had some good teachers, and/or managed to work around the poor ones.

Yes, compared to early life 1-on-1 teachers online university lecturers make a small difference. Compared to baseball players they make a large difference.

also, the impact of a teacher on a single child can be a lot greater than the impact of a celebrity on a single person. this is not to say that the reverse is not also true, especially if the celebrity is inspiring a young musician or sports star. ultimately, this is entirely subjective. what does "impact" mean, anyway ;-)